Monthly Archives: June 2011

Last night I painted the latest two cactus pots that I sculpted.These come from chatting with Nefarious about potential pots while we were reading, at which point we took a break and each drew our idea and I quickly brought them to 3D life. Her design actually turned out better — it’s the one with the cactus that looks more like an upside-down geriatric scrotum. Of course it’s some sort of spider beast, with a cactus for a hairdo. The more normal cactus not needing a gross-out metaphor to describe it is my design, a cactus in disguise. The masquerade mask is festooned with 4mm Swarovski crystals, which is also what the red pupils in the spider are made of. Both are coated with automotive engine enamel which I like because it’s much, much tougher than normal clear sprays and quite chip proof.

As should be no surprise, I had plenty of fun making these, even though I had to replace the legs on the spider twice on account of my dropping misadventures. There are lots more views from different angles after the break if you would like to see more detail.

Awwww mannnnnnnn…. I have broken so much of my work today, sometimes more than once, a second time after repairing it. Sometimes it’s seizures and sometimes it’s plain old clumsiness. I’m not sure which is worse but it is definitely time to put the tools down for the night. I even damaged the paint job on the skull mouse. It won’t be a tough fix but it delays the assembly job by a day. I’m working on a couple more cactus pots for fun as you can see. Totally in progress, early progress.

I was tickled to see my Jeep posted on one of my favorite blogs, Hack a Day, although it was frustrating to see that some of the trolls commentators seemed to have trouble relating to it and were perhaps feeling a little classist. Naw! It didn’t take away from the ego trip. But… As promised, on to the titular creation:

So, yeah… I wanted to quickly post the little cactus pot that I made out of Apoxie, just adding a few worm loops whenever I had a bit left over. I’m going to be making a bunch of these because I picked up a set of cacti for about a dollar a piece. When I was done the body of the bowl, I put a temporary support on the bottom and made some tentacles. Since they hardened hanging to the ground, once the support was removed it looked like the tentacles were doing all the work. I painted it in Vallejo acrylic model paints, and then sprayed it with a high temperature clear silica paint that’s designed for car exhausts, so it’s quite solid. Which reminds me, I had been keeping all my paints in a box and it was getting awkward and messy, so I built myself a little shelf that hangs under my coffee computer table for them. It’s a double-deep double row so it’s still not perfectly convenient, but it’s much nicer I think.

Speaking of the truck and exhausts, last night I tore off the last three feet of exhaust pipe (from behind the muffler on back), so I’ll have to deal with that shortly. Other than that Caitlin and I had to run some errands and while out I picked up Nefarious a bug and frog collecting container that has a cool magnifying lid, making me quite certain that I’ll be going on a body-destroying hike in the forest after school. And then of course I’m finishing off the mouse assembly as mentioned. I just spent half an hour photographing all the pieces, so all I have to do now is make a drive belt for the scroll wheel, a connector for the battery (the mounts are done so this will be easy), and then assemble it.